Vance's speech — a reflection of times to come

The recent speech by US Vice President JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference clearly reflects the shape of the future. It reflected on how the Trump administration is thinking; and which principles it will hold dear to forge new partnerships and alliances. It laid down the ground rules for the world to differentiate between the Biden world and the new Trump world.

As a global hegemon, the US recognised and worked with states running on the political system of partial autocracies and partial democracies, and given what the US vice president said in his speech, such an arrangement may no longer be an acceptable norm to the Trump administration.

Has the US finally decided not to relive the era of previous decades in which it turned a blind eye toward many dictators and their dictatorial regimes around the world? I seriously doubt that. However, the next few months will determine whether the Americans are willing to walk the talk. In his speech, the US vice president addressed the European leadership and said that the continent's greatest threat was not from Russia and China but 'from within'. The two takeaways from his speech were about 'ignoring the voter's concern' and 'clamping down on freedom of speech'.

President Trump is not a warmonger and he has his particular set of preferences. What Vice President Vance said in his speech is consistent with the views of the outside world. In this information age, many regimes worldwide are not sure how to handle information. The easiest choice that most regimes make is to control the mainstream media believing that only they know what is true.

This results in people losing faith in mainstream media and switching to many other platforms to seek information that they consider may be true. People are just concerned about accessing information that makes sense and the average person under all such regimes is hunting and hungry for alternative voices that might be true. A big example of people's dissatisfaction with the established regimes and their domestic and foreign policies is the US itself. When people in the US found their own country complicit in the Gaza genocide, they voted it out.

Fair elections and their results enabled American people to vote out a party that they considered was not doing a good job. To reach such a conclusion the American people were relying on a host of information platforms to seek truth and construct their reality and not the reality that was being pushed down their throats by an American administration that prioritised its strategic interests and conducted a militarised foreign policy.

The essence of the vice president's speech was to tell the Europeans that they had retreated from their shared values, ignoring voter's concerns and free speech. He questioned how their established democracies could be destroyed by digital advertising from abroad. He was referring to the cancellation of Romanian elections held in December last year on the pretext of Russian influence on these elections due to an alleged excessive disinformation campaign through Russian digital advertising. He also gave the example of Brussels's warning to shut down social media during unrest if the media was judged to contain hateful content.

The US vice president's speech was universal in content. His idea about states needing a mandate to govern to become competitive economies and have affordable energy and secure supply chains is universally applicable. Especially, his idea that thin mandates produce unstable results was practical. What he didn't say anything about was the kind of results that may be produced if a regime is imposed on the people with a stolen mandate. However, the assertion in his speech that "if you are running in the fear of your voters, there is nothing America can do for you" is a reminder of the democratic values that America wants not only Europe but the entire democracies around the world to uphold.

He also emphasised how countries can be more insecure if the people are not set free. "There is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions, and the conscience that guide your people" is what he said. He was very clear in how America viewed any democratic mandate when he said that "you cannot win democratic mandate by censoring your opponents and putting them in jail, whether its leader of opposition, humble Christian praying in his own home or a journalist trying to report a news."

On what can happen to a democracy that doesn't value people's concerns, the American VP said, "What no democracy will survive is telling millions of its voters that their thoughts, concerns and aspirations, their pleas for relief are invalid or unworthy of even being considered." On media censorship, he spoke a single line worth quoting: "There is no reason for firewalls you either uphold the principle or you don't."

There was so much in the American vice president's speech that says how the new Trump administration may engage in a diplomatic relationship with the rest of the world. The Europeans were flabbergasted and some of them didn't like being lectured on democratic values and democratic moralities but that is the change we are looking at. President Trump is all set to end the war in Ukraine which I always believed was an unnecessary war that President Putin was forced to fight. The matter could have easily been resolved in 2014 during the flopped Minsk agreement.

At that time the civil war in Eastern Ukraine was on, but France and Germany were not interested in shutting down that war or preventing its further escalation. With the monkey of the Ukrainian war off its back, the Trump administration may find more time to emphasise dictatorial and hybrid regimes around the world to put their houses in order. It may only do that if its strategic necessities don't force it to turn a blind eye toward them.

History tells us that when it comes to choosing between a strategic or moral necessity, America usually prefers the former. Its unconditional support for Israel is a current and vivid example of why America finds it so hard to walk the talk. Even if the US vice president didn't mean what he said, it was a different and nice speech to hear for a student of world politics.